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Elon Musk's SpaceX Offers Low-Cost Rockets
HobbySpacer writes "The cover article of the latest issue of Aviation Week looks at SpaceX and how its Falcon line of rockets threatens to shake up the space launch industry. Founded by Elon Musk, who also started PayPal, SpaceX is developing the Falcon I (first flight this summer) and Falcon V (first flight in 2005) that will cost as little as 20-30% of what competitors like Orbital Sciences and Boeing charge for comparable vehicles."
Is the instability that a lot of people found when testing the falcon. I am surprised how positive this article is.
Considering the high cost of most payloads, do you think most companies will jump on board with them having no proven launch record in the hopes of saving some cash? Even with insurance, the considerable delays caused by losing a payload would likely outweigh any savings made by using one of their launch vehicles. That's not to say that they won't produce some great hardware, but it may be an awfully slow start for them.
With Boeing in its sights, SpaceX ironically wanted to validate its own Falcon I calculations against high-quality Boeing Delta hardware and found a Boeing-discarded Delta II interstage section in a Hollywood, Calif., junkyard on which to make those calculations.
Nice to know they leave this stuff lying around...
The falcon first stage, which represents the bulk of the mass of the vehicle, is designed to be reusable. It will deploy a parachute, land in the ocean and be recovered. The only expendable part in the first stage is the nozzle.
They have also developed their own turbopump and reusable engine with quite impressive performance.
And all that for less than 100 million $. For that kind of money, NASA could probably produce a really nice paper study, but nothing that gets off the ground.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
From the article:
Starting with the first flight this summer, the vehicle's first stage will be reusable.
After propelling the second stage and payload to 56 mi. and Mach 9, a 75-ft. parachute will be blasted out of the first stage nose by a 10,000-lb.-thrust mortar. The chute will lower the vehicle to a splashdown 500 mi. off Baja California, where it will be recovered for $50,000 by the crew of the salvage tug Aahu.
So, they're not just copycats, they introduce innovative technologies to keep the costs down.
So, there'll probably be some fierce competition in the space delivery business before the scramjet tech becomes viable. After that point it's anybody's guess which companies will come on top.
Sigged!
Will these hold up to the intense specs NASA has? That is one reason things are so expensive. Previously mentoned on /. about how some gears were in backwards yet never broke is an example of how tough the specs are. Then there is all the testing that needs to be done which is expensive. Will these meet all the NASA and other space agence requirements to use??? Will they meet Military specs to be used by the miliraty?? They may only be able to be used by comercial industry if they aren't up to spec.
Evolution or ID?
I always thougth that most of the space treaty are so worded that only governement or governement allowed company can launch anything in space, and that if you really want to launch anything you have got to ask 10000's of autorisation to all kind of agency everywhere.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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At least all those other technical areas have had even less money invested in them than space launch - so there's good reason to hope all the needed breakthroughs can be made soon - with some R&D money.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Well, first, it's a huge business risk. People *have* tried to step in, but nobody has managed to do so successfully. Check out astronautix.com and browse their database for a whole load of things that were promised to be cheaper but weren't. Garry Hudson has tried several times, in fact.
Second, because NASA has done much to discourage competition. Like the point in the 80s where they were trying to shut down Atlas, Delta, and Titan so that everything would launch on the shuttle.
Gentoo Sucks
Don't imagine that this guy is a well-meaning geek. I've met him, and he went on at length about how much he admired Microsoft's business practices.
Well, the cost decision is a feedback loop.
If it costs $30M to get into orbit, you don't waste that on a $1M satellite. You use it for a $30M+ satellite. NASA should be safe for high-cost payloads provided that they have the reliability record (only time will tell).
If it costs $6M to get into orbit, then a whole pile of people can get into the game that weren't previously there, and some design decisions may change. Plans like GPS look much more attractive provided the satellites are cheap. Consider launching 50 $2M satellites:
With NASA, that costs you $1.5B (launch) + $100M (hardware).
With SpaceX, that costs you $300M (launch) + $100M (hardware).
SpaceX is an attractive option provided they can launch very frequently, even if their reliability is terrible. Simply build 100 satellites and if half fail, you're still way ahead of the NASA budget.
Remember, what often makes launch failures so catastrophic is not the $30M lost on the launch, but the $1B lost on hardware at the tip of that rocket.
SpaceX will cause people to design cheaper, less-advanced satellites. Unfortunately, it will also further clutter our orbital spaces. I really have to think that with the advent of private launches, that the world govts need to coordinate and essentially tax each launch to cover debris tracking and ultimately debris cleanup.
I can totally see this working. Start a company from scratch, instead of using the contracting behemoths. Contracting costs are largely sheer bloat and bureaucracy (hmm...70-80% of the total cost?) A new company (SpaceX) could be lean mean rocket-making machine.
I saw a Dilbert cartoon where they pushed a Satellite into orbit using a laser + a really big sail of some sort. This is a cartoon, I know, but is there any basis in reality for that sort of launch?
"Derp de derp."
The key to lowering the cost of launches is mass production and that means emphasizing manufacturing design, rather than rocket design.
That might be one approach -- but the Lockheed Martin (then Martin Marietta) factory south of Denver, when it was built in the early 1960s, was capable of rolling out a Titan II every week (actually the peak was closer to 6/month). Back then, aside from their role in the Gemini program, they were also our ICBM of choice.
You're still left with the problem of guaranteeing that something (the rocket you just built) you haven't tested under operational conditions will work correctly the first time. Would you be willing to book a ticket for a trans-Pacific flight aboard a 747 that just rolled off of Boeing's assembly line? (No shakedown flight, no place for an emergency landing, just load and go.)
That's fine for low-value payloads where you don't mind if you lose one every once in a while, or for ammunition, but carrying people is going to require an order of magnitude better reliability, which is either very expensive (you can't really inspect-in quality) or we need to come up with vehicles that can be test-flown, reflown, and have reasonable emergency abort provisions.
(And you're right about the chicken and egg problem. My wife used to be a manufacturing engineer for Martin, involved in a lot of studies on how to streamline and automate the production process for various real and projected launch vehicles. Low volume demand nearly always meant it was cheaper to just stick with the old methods (a lot of hand labor) than invest in new equipment and processes.)
-- Alastair